Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

Maintaining the Network

Maintenance of the network continues to be our largest item of expenditure, absorbing about one third of our budget each year. This is the amount required to keep the network safe and maintained in a steady state condition.

Maintenance covers a wide range of essential activities, but can be categorised as:

• Routine maintenance such as clearing hazardous defects, clearing debris and litter, treating ice and snow, clearing drains, and cleaning and replacing signs
• Roads renewals including new road surfaces, and other roadworks  such as footways, cycle tracks, safety fences and drains
• Structures renewals, for example the repair and rebuilding of bridges and underpasses, tunnels and gantries
• Technology renewals including repair of variable message signs, cameras, emergency telephones and equipment in control centres

We have continued working to maintain our network assets at an optimum level. To assist in this we have taken significant steps in the development of an integrated asset management programme, the aim of which is to optimise the operation of the network by taking a long term strategic approach to the management and monitoring of its asset performance. Our strategy is to integrate all existing systems holding asset data on pavements, drainage, geotechnics and structures, into a single, reliable data source with unambiguous ownership. A decision support tool is being developed to enhance our analysis and modelling capabilities, for example, by allowing us to examine the impact of different investment levels on the condition and performance of our assets. The system's reporting capability will be available to everyone who needs access to asset reports, both within the Highways Agency and our supply chain. Looking further ahead, from 2012, we will also deliver routine maintenance through the integrated asset management system. This will enable an optimised schedule, delivering maintenance and inspections by need rather than routine.

Safety improvements

We continue to operate one of the safest road networks in the world. We have kept ahead of our longterm safety target set by the DfT by introducing new measures to improve road user safety and our network safety performance.

We remain on target to achieve our part of the DfT's target for improved road safety of a 33 per cent reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured by 2010.
However, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain downward pressure on the numbers of people killed or injured. Engineering improvements cannot provide the entire solution, so we have shifted the focus of our road safety improvement activity. We are working with others, such as local highway authorities, industry and the emergency services, to influence driver behaviour. We also involve road users in the process, with particular focus on higher risk groups such as young drivers and motorcyclists. Our Strategic Safety Action Plan sets out the key actions we are taking to reduce deaths and injuries on the network.

The three main themes are:

• The provision of information and raising of awareness amongst staff, partners and road users
• Working in partnership to achieve targets and objectives
• Applying effective and robust procedures to ensure that safety improvements and measures achieve the outcomes intended

Driver information programmes

Driver education forms an important part of our strategy to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads. Working with variety of road user groups, industry and emergency services we have further developed our driver information programmes, (DIPs), aimed at the long-term improvement of driver behaviour.

DIPs are distributed through a variety of media such as DVDs, magazines, and audio CDs, and can be accessed on our website. They cover a wide range of topics including towing, driving with a disability, HGV driving, safely fitting child car seats, and motorcycle safety. The material is versatile, customer focused and above all engaging. We estimate that we deliver around half a million DIPs each year to customers. Their impact extends well beyond our network, therefore making a contribution to casualty reductions country-wide.

Keeping the network snow free

In February 2009 despite the worst snowfall in 20 years, all motorways were kept open, with the exception of the two bridges across the Severn where ice dropping from the structures forced a day's closure. And by using contingency plans to monitor and replenish salt stocks we were able to help local authorities as they faced often severe shortages. This severe weather was the first full test for our new fleet of winter service vehicles which have begun to replace our older gritters.

The new vehicles tackle snow and ice using state of the art monitoring technology on board. Their introduction marks our move towards use of pre-wet salt, which gets to work faster on the road surface to prevent ice formation, and uses 20% less salt.